Cassowaries Rant

One good reason for lazy people to hate Qt

I hate Qt and Java. This is because people who use it are lazy. Think about it: write once, use anywhere. Qt apps can run on Unix-like X Window Systems, on Windows, on MacOS X, and probably other platforms besides. However, what does this mean? This means that the applications aren’t native. As a user of mostly Gnome applications, if I write a Qt app, it’ll probably look like one. Due to the relationship between the Gnome HIG and the Aqua HIG, it’d probably be acceptible on the Mac, but there’ll certainly be problems on Windows.

Case in point: the Opera webbrowser. Opera was written in Qt. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) was also written in Qt. One would hope, then, that the X version of Opera might at least be similar to the X version of KDE. Not so. The X version of Opera looks and feels exactly like a Windows application. It simply doesn’t fit. It makes me wonder whether the Mac OS X version suffers the same problems—does it have the same MDI? I imagine it’s spared of the Windows 98–style saveboxes, though.

Having to program different interfaces separately means that you’ll be more likely to get a native inteface on every platform. (That being said, there’s no reason why internal stuff shouldn’t be write-once-run-anywhere.)